"WE ARE GOD IN HERE"

Most critiques of the Trump administration share a common narrative: Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling critical parts of the government so they can give tax breaks to themselves and their rich friends. But what's actually happening seems much stranger.

Hamilton Nolan points out that, in fact, the policies of Donald Trump are quite like to make rich people poorer.

Generally speaking, throughout the history of modern America, the government has worked on behalf of business.... The Democratic Party tends to lean a little more towards shared prosperity and regulation, and the Republican Party tends to lean more towards raw unfettered capitalism, but both have operated in service of the basic mandate of “protect and increase America’s wealth.” ...

Trump is doing something different: He is making decisions that will clearly harm the American economy, in both the short and long term. He is breaking things that are useful to business interests.

For instance, he's destroying the rule of law. Why?

The rule of law is a necessary ingredient for long term growth of businesses. Love “free” markets? Then you love the rule of law: it offers predictability of rules, and predictable enforcement of those rules. It is the thing that allows businesses to make long term investments and sign contracts and trust that those things will be governed by a transparent set of rules that all sides of the transaction understand.... The Trump administration is not just weakening the rule of law—it is replacing it with gangsterism, which is to say, the opposite of the rule of law.... The world’s biggest and most complex corporations have been reduced to paying bribes in order to directly beg the president for their priorities, at the club the president owns. Trump is trying to make the Fed a part of his own political operation, endangering financial markets for short term political gain. And he is seriously flirting with defying federal courts and plunging the nation into a constitutional crisis that it may not recover from any time soon....

... Trump ... is busy replacing the world’s most sophisticated corporate legal regime with a system in which you must grovel at his toes in a ridiculous red hat in order to get anything done.

And as for tariffs:

Trump’s affinity for tariffs is not the act of a man doing a favor for business interests. It is the act of a guy who has a weird idea in his head and has clung to that idea for decades because he believes he is the smartest man in the world.

Nolan can't fathom why Trump is doing this, though I think he comes close when he writes, "This is interesting in the same way that the methods and predilections of a prolific serial killer are interesting."

Trump isn't the only one giving off serial killer vibes. So are Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr.:

Thousands of federal employees at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were notified early Tuesday morning that they were subject to a reduction in force, or RIF ... shuttering programs that directly serve and inform the American public.

The effect was felt across the CDC, as workers in the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice (DEHSP), the Division of Population Health, the Division of HIV Prevention, the Division of Reproductive Health, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control all received RIF notices today.

Dozens of other programs throughout the CDC’s national centers for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion; HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention; Environmental Health; Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; and the Global Health center were also impacted.

Jamelle Bouie has said that he thinks Kennedy is practicing eugenics.

I think there's truth in that, and Musk has his own ideas about who's fit and unfit:

Interesting observation https://t.co/xHD5VeS1IC

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2024

But there's a sadism about the way all of this is being done that isn't an inevitable part of eugenicism. And why does Musk -- a businessman whose best-known company sells consumer products -- happily work with a president who's giving consumers more and more reasons every day not to make major purchases? Why doesn't he seem to care whether his potential customers die in preventable ways?

These folks seem to be behaving like people who imprison and enslave the innocent in locked basements. They're going to elaborate lengths to make us suffer, for the pure power trip of it. While we often say that "the cruelty is point," cruelty appears to be so motivating to these men that it overrides other motives, like keeping the system healthy enough to sustain itself. The sadism -- the joy of forcing us to accept all of this pain and suffering -- seems to be what really matters.

A phrase that keeps coming to mind is one I used to see back in the 1980s in Amnesty International fund-raising letters: We are God in here. The phrase appeared in a statement Amnesty provided for a 1984 congressional hearing on torture:

With the government's support the torturer controls everything, even life itself. An Argentine woman, Graciela Guena, remembers the guards telling her, "We are God in here," as they repeatedly applied electric shock to her body. She lay handcuffed to the springs of a metal bed, her cries echoed by the screams of other victims and the laughter of their torturers. "They called us 'the walking dead,'" she said, "reminding us constantly that the only thing to be decided was the time of death."

"We are God in here" certainly comes to mind when I read this story:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15.

... in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody.

They're not admitting error because they regret what they've done. They're admitting an error they refuse to undo because they want us to see that we can't hold them accountable. (Obviously, one phone call to El Salvador's Trump-fanboy president, Nayib Bukele, could get this prisoner returned.) They are God in here -- "here" being the entire United States, and wherever else their power extends.

Obviously, in many regimes, sadism of this kind is meant to keep society going on the regime's terms. That's true here, but the sadism also appears to be an end in itself. They want us to suffer. Our suffering makes them happy. Destruction for the hell of it makes them happy. It's why they're doing all this.

I don't know what specifically happened in the childhoods of Trump and Musk (or people like Russell Vought) to make them this way. I sometimes think that Kennedy, in his childhood, experienced the assassinations of his uncle and his father and now wants to get back at the world by dealing death. Whatever motivates these people, I think we need to look beyond history and political science to understand it.